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By Peter Rejcek
Elementary school teachers browsing the Internet for
classroom inspiration on topics about Antarctica have
a dizzying amount of material available. A popular Web
search engine will pull up more than 39 million results.
The Arctic is apparently even more popular, with some
58 million possible choices and counting.
Where to start? Whom to trust? And how to fit polar science
topics into an already crowded curriculum?
A new online magazine focusing on the polar regions,
Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears, provides a one-stop site
of resources specifically designed for teachers of grades
K-5. Funded by the National Science Foundation as part
of the International Polar Year (IPY), the Web site helps
teachers understand complex polar issues and offers suggestions
and materials on how to engage young students in what
can be heady science topics.
Despite a pop culture love affair with polar megafauna
like polar bears, penguins and seals fanned by movies
and media, elementary school curricula are generally weak
when it comes to hard science, according to project collaborators.
“There’s just not a whole lot out there [for
polar science]. There are not a whole lot of good elementary
resources on the Web for science as it is,” noted
Kim Lightle, principal investigator for the project, with
Ohio State University’s College of Education and
Human Ecology.
There are quite a few challenges for educators teaching
science at these grade levels, Lightle said. The biggest:
Most elementary school teachers aren’t trained in
science. “That’s probably not why they got into
elementary school teaching,” Lightle said. “They
like the reading, and they love the kids.
“If science is taught, it’s often in a disjointed
way,” she added.
To take advantage of the literature-centric curriculum
practiced by most schools in those early grades, project
collaborators designed the materials for teachers to integrate
polar topics into regular lesson plans.
“What we’re trying to do is the Trojan horse
approach: to continue to have teachers doing what they’re
very comfortable doing, which is the literacy, but have
science be the core of that teaching.”
Lightle and her team will produce 20 theme-oriented issues.
They chose themes after reviewing elementary school curricula
across the United States and identifying common topics,
according to Jessica Fries-Gaither, project director of
Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears, also with Ohio State
University’s College of Education and Human Ecology.
“So we aren’t asking elementary teachers to
fit something new and extra into an already crowded curriculum,”
said Fries-Gaither, a former elementary school teacher.
“We’re looking for themes that they’ve
already taught that would be relevant, and would be a
way for us to work the polar regions into the context.”
For example, an upcoming issue will focus on rocks and
minerals found in the Arctic and Antarctic, to dovetail
into a general lesson about geology.
Each issue includes five departments: In the Field: Scientists
at Work, Professional Learning, Science and Literacy,
Across the Curriculum, and Polar News and Notes. The first
issue of the magazine, “A Sense of Place,” introduced
details about Arctic and Antarctic geography and characteristics.
The feature story for “In the Field” in that
issue follows Byrd Polar Research Center researcher Katy
Farness and her work to image ice sheets and glaciers.
Fries-Gaither said it’s particularly challenging
to write and adapt material about complicated issues,
such as climate change, at a level that is appropriate
for the e-magazine’s audience. “The science
that is going on is very high level, probably even more
so than the teachers themselves care to really know about,”
she said.
Many of the current science resources for elementary
teachers are too advanced for their classrooms, Lightle
added. “We had to start from scratch in a lot of
these topics that we decided to work on.”
The site has attracted more than 1,500 unique visitors
since it launched on March 1. Comments on the site’s
blog, which provides current news and announcements about
polar events, suggest the material is resonating with
its target audience.
An elementary teacher north of the U.S. border wrote,
“I’m really grateful for this resource …
I have been trying to encourage interest in the International
Polar Year at my elementary school in Canada. This has
involved an endless search for resources, current information
and news updates whilst attempting to convince others
of the Polar Regions’ importance and the reality
of IPY! … Finding your concise and informative online
publication geared toward elementary teachers and students
has encouraged me to continue!”
Even individual families are using the Web materials.
“What a great resource! We’re a homeschooling
family and I intend to make use of the material in your
magazines,” read another blog comment.
Lightle said the material, which includes contributions
by guest writers as well as a professional science writer,
also clears up misconceptions students and teachers may
have about the poles. “One of the goals of this project
is not to make little scientists but to keep students
interested in the sciences,” she said. “We really
are trying to engage kids with technology.”
On the technology end of the project is the National
Science Digital Library (NSDL), which the NSF established
in 2000 as an online library of resources for science,
technology, engineering and mathematics.
NSDL offered a ready-made technical platform for Beyond
Penguins and Polar Bears, according to Lightle. Dean Krafft,
one of the principal investigators at NSDL with Cornell
University, said the online repository, with 2.2 million
records, has resources that cover pre-K to graduate studies.
“All of the resources were vetted by somebody, so
the quality is the key component,” he explained.
“It’s a one-stop shop for resources focused
on science.”
In fact, the online magazine follows another NSF-funded
project that Lightle heads — the NSDL Middle School
Portal, a Web site that channels appropriate online resources
from the NSDL to middle school math and science teachers.
One of the in-depth topics was science and the polar regions.
Then IPY, a two-year science campaign concentrating on
the Arctic and Antarctic, came along. Lightle and her
team decided to submit a proposal based on their experience
with the middle school polar-themed materials. “We’d
already done a lot. We needed to bring IPY to elementary
teachers.”
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